I finished re-reading all my Usagi Yojimbo books a couple weeks ago (I’m a big Stan Sakai fan), so I got the thought that I should read his inspiration, Musashi (Sakai’s main character is an anthropomorphic bunny named Miyamoto Usagi).
While I was reading Musashi, I also started a Japanese manga series about classic literature from 600 CE to the 20th century. I’m on the first volume of 今昔物語 (Konjyaku Monogatari, usually translated as “Tales of Times Long Past”).
Last week, I began reading volume one of The Arabian Nights (also called Tales of 1001 Nights). This is a more recent (2008) translation of the entire tales, not just a sampling of the more famous stories (e.g., Aladdin, Sindbad, Ali Baba etc.). It’s likely to take me, uh…1001 nights?
My short story “Two Strikes Against” was selected as the Winner in the inaugural Next Generation Short Story Awards! (Official list to be available next week.) UPDATED: Link here https://shortstoryawards.com/winners.php?year=2024
Basically it’s a story about a Japanese baseball player on Mars, with a twist. It got rejected a couple of years ago by several scifi magazines, so I figured why not try the sports category.
Especially since there was no scifi category.
Just grateful and thankful for the award. I hope you all get a chance to read the story!
(FWIW “Marsball” is mentioned by characters in an early chapter of Bringer of Light. In fact, I was going to call the story that. Very glad that I didn’t in the end!)
Bringer of Lightholds appeal for its imaginative setting and thought-provoking themes. Readers who appreciate a blend of speculative technology and introspective musings on the universe will find this book a stimulating read…For fans of science fiction, M. Thomas Apple’s novel offers a glimpse into a future filled with wonder and complexity.
Thanks to all who asked for a copy of Bringer of Light in the recent Goodreads giveaway!
Congratulations if you were a winner, and if you were not chosen by the system, take heart: there will be another giveaway in the near future. Thank you for your interest in my science fiction! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it!
It’s also thought that water on Earth is largely (or entirely) the result of comets and asteroids bombarding it (it remains debatable to what degree Earth already had water, but since when it formed the Earth was first molten lava and then dry as a bone, I think it far more likely that water came here from elsewhere, and science tends to agree).
I’ve already blogged about the origins of Bringer of Light, when I (finally) finished the first draft back in early September. In a sense, I’ve been constantly blogging the science behind the story.
But I haven’t discussed the characters at all. And despite what some old-fashioned writers may think (just finished a particularly badly-written snarky “why your books don’t sell” piece of trash that claimed science fiction shouldn’t have any emotions in it…say what? sorry not sorry), if the characters of a story aren’t interesting, there isn’t much point in reading a story.
So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll write a bit about the characters — the crew of the Artemis, the crew of the Sagittarius, the UN flunkies (sorry, career politicos) on Mars and Luna and so forth. There are lots of characters, and their interaction is complicated. Or is it?
I would get into my scifi influences at this point, but long blogs are slogs. So I’ll come back to that tomorrow!
Coffee time. Also to finish up at least one unrelated project and also the hardcover manuscript (which needs to be a different paper size than the paperback for some reason).
The moment we’ve all been waiting for is nearly here!
Bringer of Light is finally set to be released on March 15, 2024! (Click the link to see a book synopsis and two brief excerpts; Smashwords also has an excerpt from the beginning chapters.)
Stop by Draft2Digital to see links to your favorite bookstore online!
UPDATE: I have some difficulty convincing D2D to distribute to Amazon. Therefore, I have decided to publish Bringer of Light directly on Amazon. Stop by here to order for Kindle (released March 15th). Paperback and hard cover are also in the works.
I finally managed to get 1st edition copies of the famed Star Trek Readers, published in the late ’60s and early ’70s. My mother had copies when I was a kid, and they were among the first fictional stories I ever read.
The content varies slightly from the broadcast episodes, which apparently drew the ire of fans at the time. In defense of the British writer James Blish, he had not seen the episodes at the time of writing and was relying entirely on the scripts. As he himself wrote as an “Afterword” that appears (naturally) in the middle of the Reader II book, adapting script to prose is just as hard as adapting prose to scripts. Some scenes were skipped and dialogue boiled down to help the flow of the narrative, and fans were often upset to discover their favorite lines didn’t appear in the books.
The confusing part is the arrangement of each Reader into “books.” For example, Reader I (which has no label “I,” actually) consists of “Star Trek 2” (called “Book I”), “Star Trek 3” (Book II), and “Star Trek 8” (Book III). That reflects the original paperback publications by Bantam, but just makes things difficult. As a kid, I had no idea which episodes came before which. Not that it mattered! This was the first show I saw “in living color” — in the “TV room” of my grandparents’ house (we had a small black and white TV at home in the mid to late ’70s, so I never saw “The Incredible Hulk” (Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno) in color.)
All told, 59 of the original 79 ST: TOS episodes were adapted by Blish. Of the twenty not appearing in the Readers, “Mudd’s Women” and “What Are Little Girls Made of?” are odd exclusions. “Shore Leave” (the most childish of the first season episodes) is also not there. But there are still plenty to satisfy.
Two episodes were renamed by Blish for some reason; “The Man Trap” — the first episode broadcast but the third episode made — was renamed “The Unreal McCoy” (which gives away the plot), and “Charlie X” was renamed “Charlie’s Law.” The original pilot, “The Cage,” appears under the name “The Menagerie” as it was later broadcast (in two parts as part of the court martial of Spock, in which Star Trek characters watch Star Trek, but the novelized version omits the court martial framework — the “Afterword” comments that this script was covered in handwritten rewrites, making it difficult to work with.)
Most satisfying of all is the snarky dedication of Reader II — “To Harlan Ellison who was right all the time.”
Things just got busy at work and at home. And influenza really is strong this year, as predicted (I found out long ago that teenagers – especially guys – completely ignore suggestions regarding ways of avoiding illness due to an unwavering belief in their invulnerability).
I’ll try to make it up to you over the next couple of days.
In the meantime, here’s an Apple IIe showing the matrix (“all I see is blond…brunette…”).
M Thomas Apple Author Page 